Sunborn (54 page)

    “Stones! Talk to me!”

    She felt a surge, and the ship stretched
long,
then
longer,
and with a sudden outrush of breath, she felt herself suddenly
streaming forward.
When she focused, terrified, on the screen, she saw the target swelling in size. She gulped a breath, and in that instant, the object vanished from the screen, and she felt a shudder through her seat. /What was
that
?/

    The stones answered at last.
*Capture. We have the Adversary in our capture-field, in the cargo pod of your ship.*
 A new image blinked onto her screen: the same object, enveloped in a purplish glow. The inner walls of the cargo pod gleamed faintly around it.

    Her heart was pounding. She didn’t know where to put her fear. /How did you
do
 that?/

   
*Spatial threading. We had greater power—and perhaps, the benefit of surprise. We suspect it was not aware of us until we were very close.*

   
She closed her eyes in gasping relief. /And now?/

   
*And now we set course for your sun.*

*

   
What troubled her, she thought the following day, wasn’t so much that they were now diving toward the sun with their captive, as her fear of what this thing nestled in the belly of their ship, in the cargo pod, might be doing. Perhaps not idly accepting its captivity. In the screen, it looked unchanged—motionless in the violet force-field. Or did it?

   
*We’re uncertain of its degree of sentience,*
the stones said.
*Its evasive maneuvering might have been automatic.*

    /Can’t you find out? Study it, now that you’ve got it?/

   
*There is risk. It may be awaiting sensory signals to awaken. Probing might trigger a more dangerous state.*

   
/So you’re going to just hold on to it, until it’s time to drop it into the sun?/ She eyed the growing orb of the sun in the screen. They were moving inward impossibly fast. They had long since shot past the
Park Avenue,
 though at too great a distance to make any real-time contact. She had sent another transmission, reporting their capture of the object, but received no reply. The translator had predicted that reception might be problematic through the threading environment, but it was frustrating not knowing if her reports were being received. /Isn’t this exactly what John had to do, make some insane dash inward?/

   
*It is similar,*
 the stones conceded, then fell silent.

    More time to kill. Julie composed more messages to Earth, sending all the info she could think of.

   
“Dear Earth. Time is growing short now, as the translator and I head for the sun to drop this thing into it. We hope to obliterate it completely. I fear that it will come alive suddenly and fight us. But as far as I know, it hasn’t tried to do anything like that yet...”

   
She now included requests that all of her messages be copied to MINEXFO headquarters, to her parents and Georgia and Dakota, to the
Park Ave.,
and to the New York and London
Times,
and Al Jazeera. No more than ten seconds after she had sent this last message, she saw blinking lights on the instrument panel. /What’s that?/ When there was no answer from the stones, she started querying the computer.
“What the hell?”
she muttered when the systems-status board started filling up with warnings about hull integrity in the area of the cargo pod.
“Translator, what’s happening?”
she yelled, banging on the panel. On the screen, she saw a much larger version of the ball of light, and it seemed to be surrounded by a haze of dust.

    She felt a buzzing sensation in her wrists, as though the stones were very busy with something. Finally:

   
*We have a problem with our captive.*

    /Really./ The console now reported a failure in external lighting.

   
*We’re working to restore encapsulation.*

   
/What?/

   
*It appears the object is awake, has found a way to penetrate our encapsulation fields, and has begun to react in ways we did not anticipate.*

   
Julie blinked to look back and forth between the growing image of the sun and the screen image of the captive grain of soot now pulsing with a reddish light. She felt her throat constricting. “What exactly didn’t you anticipate?”

   
*We didn’t expect it would begin disassembling the ship.*

   
She clenched her eyes shut.

   
*Breathe, Julie Stone!*

   
She gasped in a sudden breath and realized she’d nearly passed out. “Did you say...disassembling the ship?”

   
*Apparently so. It seems to have defeated our spatial field encapsulation by using the interspatial intervals of our threading to slip outside the containment. In its immediate vicinity, it is attacking the cargo hold on a molecular level. We believe it is trying to accrete the ship’s mass to itself. It may be trying to escape, or it may have started the process of building whatever it was planning to build.*

   
This was unbelievable. Impossible. Very, very bad. Julie said softly, /How long before it dissolves a hole in the hull?/

   
*We cannot give a definite answer. We are slowing its progress. We hope to halt it.*

   
Julie felt as if she had been punched in the solar plexus. She had gotten accustomed to thinking of the translator as invulnerable, nearly omnipotent. It came as a terrible blow to think that it could be defeated. Swinging forward to face the control console, she said to the computer, “New transmission. Quote.
‘Anyone receiving this message: the enemy object has begun attacking the structure of our craft. Our mission may be in jeopardy. If we fail to destroy the object, Earth will be in danger. Keep a track on our course. The object appears to be a nano-constructor, and it may be attempting to build a weapon out of the mass of this ship. I will transmit updates when possible!’
 Unquote. Translator, please send that to all previous recipients, and repeat at three-minute intervals.”

    She sat back, catching her breath. /Okay, now what can I do? Can I help fight this thing?/

   
*We suggest you wear protection against loss of life support. Meanwhile, we are accelerating our threading toward your sun.*

   
Julie glanced out the window at the sun, shuddered, and went to the equipment locker at the back of the cockpit. She pulled out a musty-smelling spacesuit and wondered how long it would protect her if that alien thing turned her ship to dust. Would she die first from the vacuum and cold, or from being turned to dust herself?

    She started to unzip the suit, then paused. /How long do you expect me to stay in this thing? What’s the time frame here?/

   
*At our current rate of threading, we should reach the surface of the sun in about three days.*

   
/You expect me to keep this stinking suit on for three days? How am I supposed to sleep, or go to the bathroom? Forget it. Can I trust you to give me advance warning if the hull starts to come apart?/

   
*That way entails greater risk.*

   
“I’ll take the risk,” she muttered, tossing the suit into the copilot’s seat.

   
*Keep the equipment close. The activity of the Adversary is beginning to creep outside our new containment.*

   
/Again!/

   
*It is proving difficult to contain.*

   
Julie closed her eyes. /How long? How long before it empties out the air—or turns all of us to dust?/

   
*If we cannot stop it...we estimate three days.*

   
She shuddered. /Is that three days exactly? Or three days, give or take?/

   
*Give or take.*

   
She slumped in her seat and closed her eyes. /Sweet Alabama.../

Chapter 33

Sentinel

    Li-Jared was growing frantic, watching the approach of the Mindaru sentry. Very soon he was going to have no choice but to leave Bandicut and Napoleon behind.
A few more minutes—I can give them that much.
Copernicus had plotted a series of possible escape trajectories, but none of them held much hope if they kept delaying. “Jeaves, how can we tell if this thing is going to attack? What do we look for?”
    “I think we’re about to see,” said the robot, notching up the magnification on the view, where the shadowy sentinel grew steadily against the glowing atmosphere of
*
Thunder
*
.

   
Bwang.
“Oh, hell.” The sentinel was changing, like a flower unfolding—a black, carnivorous flower. Arms and petals were opening outward, and in the space within the petals there seemed to be a more consuming darkness, with fine, radiating glints of something shiny. Li-Jared rubbed his fingertips, hard, against his chest. “Do we have any idea what it’s doing?”

    “Analyzing now,” Jeaves said. The image snapped rapidly through a series of enhancement changes, leaving Li-Jared with a dizzying series of afterimages of the Mindaru vessel. It ended on the original view. “Inconclusive. But probably it’s a strike posture of some kind.”

    “Well, yeah—
damn
—all right, let’s get ready to move.” Bandie, Bandie, I am sorry.

    “Signal from John Bandicut,” Copernicus said, interrupting his thought. “He’s on his way out. Without Napoleon.”

   
Bong.
 “What—?”

*

   
Bandicut had scarcely felt the transition as he stumbled out of the star onto the tiny ledge. He gulped a breath, looked back...

   
/// Keep going! ///

   
...and stepped out into space. An instant later, he was back inside the mechanized station, staggering in the direction he thought was the way they’d been heading before. He shouted on the comm, and was stunned when Copernicus answered.
“Coppy, can you give me a signal—something I can home in on?

    After a beat, Copernicus said,
“I’ve just sent in a probe. It’s got a homing beacon and a strobe.”

   
/// Let’s get past that ridge, John, ///

   
Charli urged, nudging him to his right, where a narrow path through clusters of machinery led straight up a slope.

    Bandicut pushed off hard. He felt a tingle of dimensional shift as he crested the little pass. Then he heard a beeping in his comm, and a floating red arrow appeared before him, pointing the way. /Did you
know
 or was that a lucky guess?/ he asked Charli, breathing hard.

   
/// Not sure myself.

   
There’s the probe! Do you see it? ///

   
/Yes!/ He kicked again and soared in a low arc toward the pulsing white strobe. “Coppy! Li-Jared! We see it!”

    Li-Jared’s voice rang in his ears:
“Bandie, we’ve got company! How much longer?”

    “I see the exit!”

   
“Tell me the instant you’re out.”

   
Bandicut didn’t answer until the flashing probe and the airlock tunnel loomed before him. He dove into the tunnel. It seemed to take forever to get through it. As he fell into the ship’s airlock, he gasped, “I’m in!
Go!
”

*

   
“Go!” Li-Jared shouted to Copernicus. He braced himself as the ship detached from the Mindaru satellite and accelerated away. Moments later, they dropped back into n-space. Li-Jared watched with growing alarm. “Copernicus, are you taking us
deeper
 into the sun?”

    “That’s the idea,” Copernicus answered. “By the way, John Bandicut is on his way to the bridge.” A window in the viewspace showed Bandicut stumbling through a corridor.

    “Show him the way, will you? Did he say what happened to Napoleon?”

    “I expect the captain will share that with us.”

    Li-Jared tried not to gnaw his knuckles as he waited. He called to Ik and Antares that Bandicut was back, but Antares responded only with an upturn of the eyes and a low hum.

    A minute later, Bandicut ran onto the bridge. “Did we get away in time?” Taking in the view, he looked shocked. “Are we heading deeper into the star?”

    “Just what I was asking,” Li-Jared said. “Copernicus, what’s your plan?”

    “Captains, we are making a slingshot maneuver inside the sun’s atmosphere. I am hoping to pick up extra speed from the star’s gravity as we loop around it, and hope that the Mindaru can’t go as deep into the sun as we can. This is all happening in n-space.”

    Bandicut appeared to be still catching his breath. He squinted at the sight of the star’s roiling inner layers drawing closer. “Is it working?”

   
“I think so,” Copernicus said. “We’re increasing our lead at the moment, but...oh...”

    “Oh, what?” Li-Jared asked.

    “I think our pursuer just sped up.”

*

   
Floating together in a place where space and time intertwined in ways perhaps best described as
different,
the two quantum fluctuations tried to follow the unfolding events among the ephemeral ones. Daarooaack could see that the stream of strange matter from
*
Thunder
*
to
*
Nick
*
 had been partially blocked. The curious being they had seen intersect with the ephemerals from time to time, the one called Ed, was visible now and seemed to have played a part.